From Mshiltonj wiki

Christmas Day 2003 marks a significant event in my life. It may be trivial to some, inexplicable to others, but to me it is a turning point.

I stopped watching TV.

I grew up in a family that watched a lot of TV. TVs were on anytime someone was in the house. We ate dinner in front of the TV. So naturally I continued to watch a lot of TV as an adult.

But several things led to me to give up TV…

I had already practically given up commercial radio. For the past few years, the only time I listened to the radio was driving to or from work, and it was the morning shows that turned me off.

Call me crazy, but I just wanted to listen to music. But music doesn’t seem to be the focus of morning radio shows - they have two or more hosts that talk and talk and laugh so much I know they must be sniffing nitrous oxide. Then they have listeners call in for some kind of contest, where everyone would talk and laugh some more. Don’t forget the commercial breaks. Then, maybe, they would play a couple songs.

I did not consider this entertainment.

Now I listen to NPR almost exclusively, despite their liberal-leaning perspective, with some commercial free college radio thrown in. Sometimes I miss a good mix of classic rock, but I’ve got Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and AC/DC on CD. I’ll live.

Also, I work on the Internet all day, so I have my choice of mostly commercial free streaming Internet radio stations. My current taste in music is far outside the Britney-fied pop mainstream, so I’ll usually listen to smaller niche stations that play industrial, darkwave, gothic or old school punk music.

Anyway, back to why I stopped watching TV.

First, I had a child. Having children will automatically reduce the amount of time you have to spend on anything and everything you do in a day. Having a child will also radically change what you watch on TV as well. Once Tara, my little girl, turned two, the TV spent most of it’s time on PBS Kids, Nick Jr., or Playhouse Disney.

So, the time available for “Big People TV” was limited to a short time after I came home from work, and then a little bit after Tara went to bed.

I don’t know if I have changed, the programming has changed, or both, but now I just can’t stand anything on television. I never, ever understood why Friends was so popular. I’ve never watched West Wing. Everybody Loves Raymond is OK but not that great… Honestly, there is never, never anything on that I look forward to watching.

OK, there is one recent exception. FOX had a short-lived show called FireFly. It was a combination sci-fi/western show created by Joss Whedon. Jennifer and I *really* liked the show. I rearranged my schedule to watch it Friday’s at 8. I didn’t answer the phone for that hour. There’s a long story behind this show’s troubles, but FOX only aired 9 episodes before it was canceled. Only 9. But it generated enough fan enthusiasm that FOX put the series on DVD, including three un-aired episodes, and it is being developed into a movie. I own the DVD set. It’s a great show.

The point is that shows I can’t stand, like Friend’s and Will & Grace, just go on and on and on, but quality shows like FireFly get canned. The network people who decide what gets put on TV obviously don’t know how to pick shows I want to watch.

It turns out I was paying for cable to watch Law & Order reruns, Saturday Night Live reruns, and The Daily Show. That’s pretty much it.

And there are so many commercials. I’ve seen commercial breaks last as long as seven minutes. Seven minutes!

News programs, especially, have driven me to turn off the TV. They are nearly absent of news, because they have so many commercial breaks, and the shows themselves spend so much telling you “what’s coming up next,” “what’s coming up later in the show,” “what’s on the show tomorrow” and “what’s coming up tonight on some other show.” Then they give you two headlines and a two-minute interview. Then they go to break.

On many mornings, as I’m getting ready for work, the TV would be off until I’m about to eat breakfast. I would like to watch a few minutes of news while I’m eating my bagel or bowl of cereal. It only takes so much time to eat breakfast, and every morning it was a roll of the dice on whether or not I’d get to watch actual news or end up watching commercials or some sort of news promotion. Most times I lost.

On weekends, on the few days I actually had time to relax and watch a little TV, I would spend the whole time with the remote and I would just flip, flip, flip. Nothing on except infomercials, 70s and 80s reruns, sports, old movies – nothing.

Sometimes I’d run across a movie that I liked, like “Outlaw Josey Wales” on TBS. I’d stop to watch it. The funny thing is I own it on DVD! I could watch that movie anytime I wanted, unedited and with no commercials, but for some reason I’d stop to watch it on TBS because “it was on.” How stupid it that?

I could go on. It was becoming pretty evident to me that commercial TV simply was not worth my time or money. But there were a couple gems like The Daily Show, and Tara was able to watch her kids shows, so we kept cable.

Then two things happened.

Tara was three and an half years old this Christmas. This year she was old enough to understand Santa and presents and what the season was all about. Commercial TV was able to get to her. Jennifer (my wife) and I got to hear “I want this.” and “I want that.” And I don’t know how McDonald’s does what it does, but somehow they infected Tara’s brain with the notion that food only tastes good if comes from a McDonald’s restaurant. It’s frightening at how skilled the marketing campaigns aimed at children can be.

We could also see Tara being influenced in more subtle ways. She was picking up things like “girls play with princess dolls and go to the mall” and “I must have things that other people have” and basically that conformity is a virtue.

I’ve spent my life being surrounded by those types of messages. I would feel dirty if I didn’t step in and stop my daughter from being subjected to it.

The final thing that happened, oddly enough, was seeing Return Of The King in the theater, one the finest movies ever to be seen.

After the movie, Jen and I joked on the way home that next year, when the Extended Edition DVD is released, the movie itself will probably be spread over three separate DVDs. Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers are on two DVDs each. Return of the King will be nearly four hours long. Since there are multiple commentary tracks for the movie, there just won’t be enough room to fit the third movie on two discs.

The joke continued: This means that if I wanted to watch the entire Lord Of The Rings trilogy, all 10 or so hours of it, I could watch one DVD from the trilogy each night of the week, and that would be all I watched. After seven days, I could turn around and start watching it again. Because I won’t have seen the beginning of the story for a whole week.

OK, I admit, we were a little flush with Lord Of The Rings fervor after watching Return Of The King – it was a good, good movie.

I doubt I’ll watch a Lord Of The Rings DVD every night. I could watch Pulp Fiction, or maybe Braveheart, or Outlaw Josey Wales instead.

But I could if I wanted to.

This whole line of thought came about in a single conversation as little joke on the way home from movie, but it’s still true in a strange way. Every time I come across a show like Fear Factor and am tempted to pause and watch, I’ll be actively choosing to watch people eat reindeer testicles over the Fellowship facing the long dark of Moria, and that wouldn’t make sense at all. It is unthinkable.

For all the above reasons: Time, money, quality, Tara, and the offensive notion of choosing commercial tripe over Lord Of The Rings, I no longer watch commercial TV. During the early evening of Christmas Day 2003, I unscrewed the cable from my TV. As of this writing, it has been seven days since I last watched an Old Navy commercial, heard a McDonald’s jingle, or found out “what’s coming up next.” It may be longest time I’ve done this in my entire life.

I could end this little piece here, and leave you with the impression that the TV is off all the time, but that would be disingenuous. The fact is, I enjoy video entertainment, and we have no small amount of movies and television shows on DVD and VHS – mostly children’s shows for Tara, or course.

I hate that the end of this piece ends up sounding like a commercial despite the anti-commercial slant, but the saving grace that made this decision relatively easy is Netflix. I can rent an unlimited amount of DVD’s for only $20 month, with no late fees and no going to the rental store. Their library is huge! I can still watch Law & Order on DVD, on my schedule with no commercials. It’s a rare evening when I don’t have a new DVD waiting if I’m in the mood to watch something.

Other people swear by Tivo or iControl (from Time Warner), but for those to work you have buy the hardware, pay for cable, subscribe to the service, and in the case of iControl, you have to have the even more expensive “digital” cable, and you have to pay a per-viewing fee. Seems like a way to fleece customers out of even more money to me. I’m not going to pay all that money for approximately 7-10 hours of video entertainment per week.

I’ve got better things to do with my time, my money and my mind.